From Jinja with Love by Ed Williams
In what world does one wake up for breakfast in a sleepy town on the banks of the Nile in Eastern Uganda looking forward to several more days of coaching and end up at 03.00 the next day on the tarmac at Nairobi (Kenya) airport waiting to travel onwards to Kigali (Rwanda). Well, I guess a world where one’s breakfast is disturbed by a music festival on your doorstep causing major disruption to our plans.
As you can see from the Rwanda part of the Uganda blog, we did not end up staying in Jinja, but it was the decision making process that was most fascinating. A decision was made about 09.30 to leave Jinja and head where, well we hadn’t yet worked that out. So, bungling some our kit together we set off to as yet an unspecified destination.
Leaving to be fair felt like a colossal failure. We had 3 more days of coaching to go, and not just that, we had a number of newly trained coaches we wanted to mentor. We also had no idea whether a) would we able to coach anywhere b) where that would be or c) would we just go home.
So followed the next instalment of decision making, “what” and “where”. Given Lee, the national coach of Rwanda, was with us and heading back to Rwanda two days later, that option started to look an attractive one. CWB has been going to Rwanda since 2007 and is an integral part of that country’s cricketing journey, we would be welcome there and there would be lots for us to do. It was also only an hour’s flight away (oh the naivete of making that factor part of our decision-making process!) and there were flights available and there was also a direct flight back to London on the Saturday night (which would avoid a lay-over in the middle east).
So how does an hour flight leaving at 21.30 that gets you into Rwanda at 21.30 (the country is an hour behind) in reality get you in at 04.30. Well, I guess only Rwanda Air (“the dream of Africa”) can truly answer that. To cut a long story short, we eventually boarded the plane at 12.30, and were allocated new seats at the gate. That should have made us suspicious, as should the fact there seemed a lot of people already seated on the plane as we got on it. But what disturbed us most of all was a series of discussions with passengers as to where in fact the plane was going. One poor lady claimed that it was going to Nairobi, only to be shouted down (by us included) that she must be on the wrong plane. Oh, how wrong we were. “What they did not tell you that is where you were going”, said a smiley but world-weary cabin crew. After 15 hours since we left Jinja, we had to face the reality that we were flying west to Nairobi, before heading back to Rwanda.
A direct one-hour flight, that would in reality take us 4 hours. To be fair to the team, we kept our spirits incredibly high, playing an epic card game of “Presidents and Fropsies”, drank the worst white and red wine in the annals of flying and enjoyed a sweep stake on how long we would be on the ground in Nairobi (for the record it was one hour and two minutes).
Hard to know what is going on really, when you have been awake for almost 24 hours, but we finally got to Kigali at 04.30 for the next stage of the “Uganda” trip
